Boccaccio. When Cowper was forty-five he was induced by Mrs. Unwin to write a poem, that lady giving him for a subject The Progress of Error. The author of The Castle of Otranto says in a letter, now in the British Museum, that it was suggested to him by a dream, in which he thought himself in an ancient castle, and that he saw a gigantic hand in armor on the uppermost banister of the great staircase. Defoe is supposed to have obtained his idea of Robinson Crusoe by reading Captain Rogers' Account of Alexander Selkirk in Juan Fernandez. Dr. Beddoes' Alexander's Expedition down the Hydaspes and the Indus to the Ocean originated in a conversation in which it was contended that Darwin could not be imitated. Dr. Beddoes, some time afterwards, produced the MS. of the above poem as Darwin's, and completely succeeded in the deception. EPITAPHIANA. The following is a real epitaph. It was written by Dr. Greenwood on his wife, who died in childbed, and it is in all probability still to be seen, where it was originally set up, in Solyhull churchyard, Warwickshire. The most amusing point in it is, that the author seriously intended the lines to rhyme. There is wonderful merit in the couplet where he celebrated her courage and magnanimity in preferring him to a lord or judge : Which heroic action, join'd to all the rest, Go, cruel Death, thou hast cut down Her virtues and her good qualities were such Which heroic action, join'd to all the rest, Made her to be esteem'd the Phoenix of her sex; To comfort those her loss had made disconsolate. That I can only utter two lines more. For this and all other good woman's sake, Never let blisters be applied to a lying-in woman's back. The following lines may be seen on a gravestone in the churchyard at Kinver, Staffordshire : Tired with wand'ring thro' a world of sin, In hopes to rise that Christ may give us light. A Leicestershire poet has recorded, in the churchyard of Melton Mowbray, a very different conception of our "earthly Inn." He says:— This world's an Inn, and I her guest: This is in the churchyard of Crayford, Kent: To the memory of PETER IZOD, who was thirty-five years clerk of this parish, and always proved himself a pious and mirthful man. The life of this clerk was just three score and ten, Thus his joys and his sorrows were treble, but then His voice was deep bass, as he chaunted Amen. Tradition reports these verses to have been composed by some curate of the parish. The following inscription is on the tombstone of one Margaret Scott, who died in the town of Dalkeith, February 9, 1738, aged one hundred and twenty-five years: Stop, passenger, until my life you read; The living may get knowledge by the dead. I have an end of all perfection seen. The following is very beautiful. It is copied from an inscription in All Saints Church, Cambridge: In Obitum Mri. Johannis Hammond Oenopolæ Epitaphium. Spiritus ascendit generosi Nectaris astra, Juxta Altare Calix hic jacet ecce sacrum. The following very beautiful epitaph is inscribed on a tablet in the parish church of Bardsey, near Leeds :— The following epitaph may be found on an old gravestone in the burying-ground of the parish church of Brighton : Duke of Cumberland at the battle of Fontenoy, where she received a She died at Brighton, where she had In the churchyard of St. Edmund's, at Salisbury, is the following epitaph, written by a Swedenborgian of the name of Maton, on his children : Innocence embellishes divinely complete To prescience co-egent now sublimely great Here is an inscription on a tablet in Limerick Cathedral: Mementi Mory. Here lieth Littele Samuell Barinton, that great Under Taker, of Famious Cittis Clock and Chime Maker; He made his one Time goe Early and Latter, But now He is returned to God his Creator. The 19 of November Then He Seest, And for His Memory this Here is Pleast, By His Son Ben 1693. |